Op-ed: Israeli occupation is more dangerous than Coronavirus; Prisoners are on brink of a "holocaust"

Excerpt of an op-ed by Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the official PA daily

Headline: “A racist Israeli holocaust through the Coronavirus!”

“The Israeli settlers and the occupation system’s soldiers are wreaking havoc in our land, like the Coronavirus is wreaking havoc in people’s lungs. The Israeli occupation army’s soldiers are killing our defenseless young people with their bullets and arresting them, like the Coronavirus is killing adults and people with weak immune systems, and not giving them a chance to survive…

The Coronavirus will traverse the world’s countries and reach its end, like previous epidemics that spread everywhere and afterwards disappeared. People will remember it as a murderous and temporary settler – aside from our land of Palestine, upon which the global colonialist system has brought suffering through the permanent, criminal, and lethal virus of settlement…

In the news it was reported that 1,656 people have been infected with the virus [in Israel], of which 31 cases have been defined as serious, and this is in addition to tens of thousands of carriers who have not been diagnosed, including soldiers and police officers…

This has caused the Palestinian prisoners in the occupation’s detention camps to protest and return the food portions, because the occupation authorities have not taken the necessary steps to prevent the spread of the virus, and added insult to injury when they withheld disinfectant and cleaning materials from the prisoners – as if we are on the brink of a holocaust against the Palestinian prisoners, but not through ovens but rather through an invisible virus that still has no cure!

The colonialist and settlement occupation system in the era of [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu is proving for the millionth time that it is the most dangerous ‘human virus’ known to man.Through the occupation, settlements, war crimes, and racism, they are more dangerous to humanity than a pandemic in a period of justice, equality, freedom, and rights.”